Wherein Lies Balance
by LimpBiskit
Summary: Great number 5. Thanks to all those who've lasted this long.


Title: Wherein Lies Balance  
Author: LimpBiskit  
Fandom: Sherlock BBC  
Pairing: John/Sherlock  
Rating: PG13  
Warnings: Slash.

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Sherlock Holmes was a man of coexistent action and thought.

He knew such things that could make or unmake a person's entire self, their tiny awareness of the world went under siege at even the shallowest of his glances.

No one looked him in the eye for longer than they must, not the Inspector who summoned him, the speakers of hateful words or even his very own brother, these and so many many more had been quelled and catalogued, found wanting _though what did they expect, want from him didn't they know no they didn't **see**_ and just as quickly set aside in the search for newness, something other or else that would hold the rein of his mind for even an instant-

It never lasted. Never kept pace, never even trod on the heels of that quicksilver smattering of his resting thoughts, and sometimes how his mind it _howled_ like a beast for some garish bridle, the oh so lovely bite of a needle or the coldburningflight of deep poison through willing veins, where would he land and _My God if there is one who isn't me I don't care just let me find it, have it_ when would it finally be too much or even just enough..

It was too little too late, always too damned late and how he hated to be and hated when he wasn't but this damned **human** body, it needed and cried for sustenance beyond the electric slivers of mind and calculation, to the very Devil he hated the transport that so great a living demanded..

He thought sometimes that he was not Holmes, was nothing but waiting, searching, pursuit and almighty judge of things no one else dared to touch, feared and forsaken because really, who was it that they always called when the bad went worse and sane people closed eyes against the madness of what one man may do-

He saw everything.

Even that which he knew not was seen, stored and laid atop tottering mountains of castoff knowing that one day _maybe it's today, today the needle breaks today I find no perch and it goes on so far forever_ that he would settle into a rage of boredom, the current stoppered by inactivity outside his grasp and he would need so much for these half-fathomed ideas to keep him living when there was so little life-

And here was a broken man, a good man, who questioned and saw and felt and never once looked away and _please yes those eyes **those eyes** he needed feared thought he maybe might have_ loved because he was so broken that nothing could make him what he had been and maybe didn't want to be again, it was so actual and so very close to that feeling of flight-

The story he read in that man's face, so worn a tale that frayed and unravelled along it's length until here, sound of body but unwilling to live so free, not when others like him or no, _not_ like him there was no one like him, but others had bled out their lives across his unassuming fingertips no matter how desperately tight he'd struggled to hold the wounds that rent them away and scattered them to nowhere..

And all of that and all of everything else was _new_ and _there_ and how he wanted to sift the pieces of this man's full mind until all there was of him could be seen, studied, understood and why oh why was it that he smiled when the freakish confronted him head on with nothing to give in return but the momentary embrace of thorns that wept a subtle toxin named **danger** into his free heart-

And John _wanted_ it, thirsted for every bit of anything that made peace evaporate for even an instant, and when the very fount of risk overran itself he said no more than oh God yes and they were off on the God's own work..

But men of bone and blood were never meant for that divine vindication, and even when he could have had it, taken it along with the last dose of ill-cured reason, it was this death-parched warrior of a figurehead Queen that stopped him, stopped them both from casting off the possibility **of** possibility, gave justice the motivation to tip the scales and loose the blindfold that covered what parts of a man that saw inside himself most clear-

And he never looked back, didn't want or need to because that clarity held his pace and wove his bridle, the beast grew tame and longed for a quiet lie that made him content for the first time in all his lives _and there had been so so many, he felt or knew that he lived a hundred or a thousand times all while the world lay in the silken trappings of sleep, oh he was so achingly **old** by Dawn_ to simply be, working his deathly sorcery for the pleasure of one who never thought it ghastly but instead raised those eyes in a child's own wonder and smiled just for him..

For **him**. He saw it, or it may have been no more than a silvered dream of what Heaven might be, felt for one instant that yes, here was his heart, a thing so blackened and tangled that it sometimes seemed to be made of raven's-down and rosethorns, alive and throbbing in his chest as if it would burst before submitting to that cold nothingness ever again-

And in the darkness of his room, he sometimes laughed along with the startling rhythm, because he had though that he understood _need_. He'd been wrong, all wrong because **this** was need, this crushing loneliness that had no cure unless by the touch of something so much more alive than he'd ever been, and the thought of never having the one thing that might make him human after all..

He might have gone mad, truly mad, if not for one moment of having, when that solitude was swept clear by the very hands he craved, the man's life gone but for the breath he blew into the lips that had smiled for no one the way they did for him and it wasn't enough he couldn't let go the soul that made this body _John_, and he was thankful for that damned rush of thought that let him act and do and even pray _oh no, not now please God you can't be, won't let you not take this breath I held and all the life that's in it_ until those hands closed in his lapels and the eyes he'd dreamt of so many times opened to read **him** the way no one ever did-

And they saw no more or less than a man, judged him worthy and blessed within the span of a blink and he finally finally understood that terrible instant of pain when he knew that this was a life he could never avenge should it be lost-

Impossible. Even thought froze for the time it took him to feel this ever-new thing, this lifting of a barrier against his own mortality that made him be as he was and then there was nothing, only that smile again because he had worked a miracle just for the man he now held so tightly that he must surely hear the very heart of him as it pounded the notes of some unnamed benediction-

Even now, lain beneath the familiar blankets of his rarely used bed, he thought the other must still hear it, feel it as he worshipped the hands that stroked him and the lips that spoke his name so sweetly that he all but died with every stilted breath, knew his _human_ heart and understood that it was for no one if not him..

And still it was the meeting of eyes that had him all undone, because the understanding was total and he knew now that it was the man's heart that he had always seen there, the thing that had brought him down from that high and lonely place at last, and held him low to the Earth where all men must be if they were to live-

_And what lived could love._

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And there's another little tidbit of incomprehensibility. Comments are still love? *hides* 


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